Genuine question: Is living in America as horrible as it sounds for the average, non-rich citizen? Impression I get from the media: * Education sets you in semi-if-not-permanent debt. * Housing is impossibly expensive. * Single hospital visit can be thousand of dollars. * Critical medication is hundreds of dollars a month (or more). * Unpaid, (effectively) mandatory overtime. * Many people work several jobs (as adult…
* Housing is highly location dependent. Many communities have been utterly deprived of income-producing work, and housing there can be had for a pittance. Places with opportunity to work are flooded by those seeking out the few remaining opportunities. In the past, companies and individuals would go to less-populated areas to establish manufacturing or farming ventures, making profitable use of the cheap land. with those sorts of industries leaving the country or being consolidate by conglomerates, the few remaining opportunities to earn income are consolidated into a minority of cities. Cheap credit here, too, has allowed the desirable land in these areas to be consolidated into a few financial-real-estate instruments. In other words, there is historically extraordinary demand for a commodity which is practically monopolized.
* Single hospital visits are always thousands of dollars. In the past, the American Medical Association lobbied congress to increase the cost of medical care, because they were embarrassed that the poor were able to afford the services of physicians. See the history of "friendly societies" in the US for details. Then, also, medical insurance began to be offered by companies to their employees as a way to increase tax-free wages. When this practice became common, some politicians viewed it as politically convenient to force these insurance companies to cover non-emergency procedures and doctors visits as well. This is an economic problem called "third party payer" which always results in rising prices. Medical practitioners cannot legally have two pricing tiers for the insured and the uninsured, so the high prices are what sticks.
* As for medications, take note that the previous president edicted that the prices of certain medications be lowered. The current, mainstream, president rescinded those edictions in less than one month. It is in the interest of the powerful and wealthy in this country that these prices remain high.
* The way employees may be treated depends on their classification. Hourly wage employees are legally required to be paid a premium for overtime work. Salaried employees are considered exempt from such requirements. This creates an incentive to classify employees such that they are exempted from the overtime protections. See also the practice of classifying employees as contractors to exempt them from legal protections, or preventing hourly employees from working enough hours to qualify for certain legal protections.
* The previously mentioned employee classification system is the direct cause of many people having to work multiple jobs. The people I know that had to behave this way would have preferred to work longer hours at a single employer but that would have caused their employer to provide them with the legal obligations for a full-time employee.
* Paid time off for any reason is a feature of many positions but not all of them. In practice, employers would just work to re-classify employees such that their overhead per employee was at a level they considered acceptable, regardless of legal obligations, as stated previously.
Life in the US is largely controlled by the very wealthy (oligarchs) rather than by democratic processes. This has been the mainstream political order in this country since at least the 1970s, but has been present to a smaller degree for some time before that. I will further note that there are exceptionally vast cultural, moral, practical, and ideological differences between different parts of the country, and your individual experience depends heavily on that fact.